Robert Jeffress has warned that a vote for President Obama is a vote for the “future reign of the Antichrist,” and told Janet Mefferd yesterday that if Obama secures re-election and marriage equality wins at the ballot box (it did), then America “is going to bring about God’s judgment upon our country” by backing “evil” and “reject[ing] God and His law.” He added later that he expects Obama to impose hate speech laws that could be used to imprison pastors and will try to give the government the right to select a church’s pastors and priests.

Mefferd: A lot of people look at this and think: what happened to my country?

Jeffress: And what’s happened to the Christian community? Take the same-sex marriage issue, for the first time ever the majority of young adult evangelical Christians support same-sex marriage or civil unions. I think it’s this false idea we have that somehow we don’t have any right to impose our values on society as a whole. But the fact is all values are based on somebody’s morality, and for the first two hundred years of our country it was based on Christian values and now it’s being based on pagan values. I remind people all the time that Jesus Christ is not just Lord over the church, he is Lord over all creation, he is not just interested in religious people and religious institutions, He is interested in all institutions, including government. Listen, God is no respecter of people or nations, God doesn’t get a lump in his throat when he hears the Star - Spangled Banner, He doesn’t hold America to a different standard than any other nation. Any nation that reverences God is going to be blessed by God, but any nation that rejects God and His law is going to be rejected by God. We as Christians have a responsibility to say without stuttering or stammering: this is wrong, this is sin, this is evil and this is going to bring about God’s judgment upon our country.

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Jeffress: I do think as Americans we’re going to continue to see this attempt to restrict our religious liberty and our freedom of speech. I think all you have to do is to look at the past four years to see what the next four years under Obama will be like. I think we will live to see very quickly the enactment of hate speech legislation that will try to prevent Christians and especially churches from speaking out on issues like homosexuality or the exclusivity of the Christian faith. We just saw a year ago the Obama administration attempting to say that the ministerial exemption regarding federal hiring standards should be rescinded, that will ultimately give the government the right to say who churches could hire as their pastors or their priests. I think this is where we’re going under another four years of the Obama administration.